Counter Perspective

Thank you for asking me to present this paper. I think it
is an important juncture, especially given the recent Nobel
Prize. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize for the concept called
public choice, which predicts among other things that
organizations that are largely in the public venue will have some
sort of resistance to types of change that might change their
role. It is very hard, when one tries to produce a scientific
consensus with an organization like the United Nations for this
concept not to intrude.

I would like to spend a few minutes showing you how
difficult consensus is to form, and how consensus changes. In
1990, the United Nations produced its first scientific assessment
of climate change. I was asked by my friend, Tom Karl, to review
it. I was asked anonymously to review it, because at that point
the issue had already been so politicized that some people who
were thought to give critical reviews were not invited to the
process.

In 1990, I wrote that the models that were being used
were probably producing too much warming, and it was likely that
there was something that was mitigating the warming. The review
hypothesized, because of the increases that were being observed
in cloudiness, that it would possibly be some type of aerosol or
something like that. The review was profoundly ignored, which is
not surprising.

In fact, the UN wrote in 1990 in the summary document, when
the latest models are run with impressive concentrations of
greenhouse gasses,that their simulation of the present climate is
generally realistic on large scale.

Anyway, the problem was well known, because the temperature
increase was not nearly what was projected, even by the models of
that time. It was reasonable to assume that sulfate aerosols or
something like that might be the problem, because the Southern
Hemisphere temperature increase was greater than the Northern
Hemisphere's increase. It is a very interesting history, by the
way, in that the Northern Hemisphere should warm up first and
fastest. But much of the warming of the Northern Hemisphere took
place prior to World War II, which was really when the greenhouse
effect took off.

At any rate, by the time we got to 1992, we could change the
climate models a little bit, so that in the report that was
prepared specifically for the Rio climate treaty, we now had
climate models that changed the carbon dioxide concentration
gradually, as opposed to changing it at once.

These models then formed testable hypotheses, because you
could run the models backwards and see what climate was being
projected to occur as the carbon dioxide concentration increased.

The most commonly cited of these models in the 1992 report,
and remember, the 1992 report was specifically designed to back
up the Rio treaty, was the model that came out of Princeton
University, known as the GFDL model. To give you an idea of some
of the resistance on this, the GFDL model run backwards on it's
own internal carbon dioxide concentration for the Northern
Hemispheres shows a very large and growing disparity that began
to develop about three decades ago. This is what is fueling some
of the debate on this issue.

I should point out parenthetically, in 1992 I requested the
output from this model from GFDL and was told, no, I couldn't
have it. I thought that was very strange, so I asked my graduate
student, who nobody knew was my graduate student, to request it,
and they gave it to him, and then we ran this model.

Well, anyway, you can see the problem. It gets worse when
one looks at the satellite data. The satellite data is thought
to be highly accurate. The Southern Hemisphere satellite
temperature history from when the satellite goes up in 1979 to
now shows a significant difference which has always been there.

In the Northern Hemisphere, it gets much worse. There is
cooling from Mount Pinatubo on the satellite data. There is no
trend in the satellite data itself.

Well, at any rate, what strikes me as rather interesting in
all this is, if we go back to 1992 and we read what the UN said
on that report, it said the observed warming is broadly
consistent with model projections. Does anybody believe that?
Then it was stated that the satellite data really don't reflect
the ground-based temperature because of stratospheric ozone
depletion, which would affect the top level of satellite data.

When we compare the satellite temperature and the ground-
based temperature you can see something quite interesting.The
only place where they agree is where the temperature record is
the best, in other words, in the north temperate zone, where we
have the good temperature records from the United States, the
former Soviet Union, and Europe. That is where the two records
are very much in agreement. So we have pretty good reason to
trust the satellite data.

The satellite data also matches up very well with
temperatures from 5,000 to 30,000 feet, as measured by weather
balloons. Therefore, if the satellite does not see warming, it
is probably not there.

In fact, what happened by the time we got out to 1995, the
consensus process changes much slower than some of the more
outspoken scientists on this issue. In 1995, the UN report says
now, when increases in greenhouse gasses only are taken into
account, most models produce a greater warming than has been
observed.

That is an admission that the people who were marginalized
to the process in 1992 and 1990, who said it is producing too
much warming, that was supposed to be the squalling of a small
group of skeptics, well, it turns out that that now is the
consensus.

Having said that, let's take a look at the satellite
temperature history. It is rather instructive, it is certainly
is not a global pattern. What it is, is a warming of the mid-
latitudes, primarily in the Northern Hemisphere.

Now, if one is going to hypothesize that sulfate aerosol,
which we have heard so much about, is the reason for the lack of
warming, I caution you that the sulfate regions of the planet are
the regions that are warming, not cooling.

In fact, if we take a look at the model that best tracks the
past climate, according to the new UN report, that model was
published by Mitchell et al. on August 10 in "Nature" magazine.
I would like to spend a couple of minutes talking to you about
what that model really said, because I don't think a lot of
people know.

It says, number one, if you run the greenhouse effect only,
you get a warming of 2.5 degrees for doubling CO2. Then
Mitchell
states in the paper that that model is too warm. He says it does
not track the climate over the last quarter century, it is too
warm.

The change is 33 percent, if you put the sulfates in the
model. You do get a model that tracks the past climate, he says,
of the last 40 to 50 years. The surface temperature record,
which is in some debate, shows a warming of about four-tenths of
a degree in the last 40 to 50 years, and the overall warming in
the model for doubling CO2 plus sulfates is 1.7 degrees. That
leaves you 1.7 minus .4 degrees, 1.3 degrees. That is the
remaining warming for a doubling in the model that best tracks
the climate of the past.

That is a dramatic change from previous forecasts. When one
cites a number of two degrees, that is not the number that is
driven by the model that best tracks the past.

There is a problem with this, though. In the model with the
greenhouse gasses only, temperature change by the middle of the
next century by Mitchell, et al., with the sulfates, SUL plus
greenhouse gasses only, in the high latitudes of the Northern
Hemisphere these two models are very similar.

All scientists know that the greenhouse- only models have
produced way too much warming to date in the high latitudes of
the Northern Hemisphere. The one that supports the Rio climate
treaty more than any of the others, the Princeton model, has a
warming of 2.5 degrees poleward of 60 degrees latitude between
1950 and now. The net warming observed between 60 degrees north
and the pole is zero in the last 45 years. There isn't any. It
looks like this model makes the same error.

So when I was asked to review the United Nations report, the
new upcoming second assessment, I requested what we call the
transient output from this region , because it does look like it
is making that error. I was denied five times, five separate
requests for that data.

Now, if anybody thinks that this is an effective peer review
process, I challenge them to respond to a denial of data to a
reviewer. The problem is that when we do that, we are behaving
institutionally much like Buchanan predicts. There will be a
resistance on the part of the organization to change what may
affect the organization. That I think is seminal to this issue,
because the review process is very important in any scientific
debate.

I have about seven minutes left, six at best. I am going to
finish up with a totally boring discussion of why it is not
sulfates, anyway. Academic scientists are paid to explore,
wherever your mind takes you, you must go.

One of the things that we need to do is to ask the question,
is it really sulfates? One does not say sulfates killed the
warming, or are responsible for it merely by making another
climate model that reduces the radiation input to the Northern
Hemisphere. That is guaranteed to fit the data better. It has
to, because it is too warm. You saw how well the model worked
when we didn't have sulfates in it, not very well at all. If you
reduce the radiation coming downward in the Northern Hemisphere,
it will fit better, but that won't say the sulfates caused the
problem. No, you have to do what a doctor would do. You have to
use a diagnostic approach and ask, does the model that fails fail
because of sulfates? That is a totally reasonable thing to do.

This is a mathematical formulation that explicitly tests
that. I don't want to bore you with it. It was in the "Journal
of Technology" about a year ago. What you can do is, you can
test the observed patterns of climate change versus what was
modelled.

I want to tell you the good news about the most important
pattern of climate change in the summer. I wish people who
disagree would have read this paper, because it says that the
climate models have correctly captured in the Northern Hemisphere
the most important pattern of temperature change in the summer.
They have done it. This is quite an important achievement.
Unfortunately, it is the model without sulfates. As it changed
the slopes are correct. This behavior however is not typical.
This is the behavior of a winter pattern over time in a climate
model. This is reality. There are different signs. This
happens all the time.

We can compare patterns and see how well we have done. The
patterns do the following. The climate might not change and the
model might not change. That is good. That means that the
climate was not predicted to change by the model, and it didn't
change. There can be the type one or the type two errors, where
the observed climate change didn't occur or the modelled climate
change didn't occur. There is pattern number four, where the
observed model changes are correct, and pattern number five, the
horrible mistake, where opposite to what you predicted happens.

I am going to take you on a tour through an increasingly
sulfate-laden atmosphere. Southern Hemisphere winter has no
sulfates in it whatsoever, for all intents and purposes. The
first category is where neither the model nor the climate
changes. That is what is called being half right. If you were
in Atlantic City, you would get your money back on that bet.

With the type one and type two errors, everywhere that the
model says the climate will change, it didn't, and everywhere
that the climate changed, the model said it didn't. So there is
no correct forecast of any of the observed climate changes
between pattern number four and a sulfate-free atmosphere.

Go to the North Polar region in the summer. This is
remarkable, how much the climate has changed in this region.
Only ten percent of the observed climate or the predicted climate
has not changed since 1933 in a statistically significant
fashion. Climate moves around a lot. But all the change that
was predicted didn't occur, and none of the change that occurred
was predicted. That was all type one and type two error. No
sulfates up there.

Northern Hemisphere has the sulfates. The sulfate effect is
supposed to be greatest in the summer. Here we see the best
performance on a hemispheric basis in the model, in the
hemisphere where the sulfates are when the sulfate effect is
supposed to be greatest.

When we look explicitly in the sulfate regions in the
summer, the model performs extremely well. This is the type of
climate change that is correctly modeled, and this is the type of
non-climate change that is correctly modeled. There is very
little error in the sulfate region. Only one problem: this is
the model that was predicting the dramatic warming that didn't
occur. This is the model that bases the 1992 convention, in
large part. This is the model without the sulfates.

So now you see the problem, don't you? Sulfates are not the
disease. But you can get it to act like they are the problem
with the forecast. It is much like if you went to a doctor with
an infection, and the doctor gave you steroids, which will reduce
the inflammation. The climate model had an inflammation. It was
too warm. So we put something in it that drives down the
inflammation. Then we find out later that we did not affect the
cause of the inflammation.

It is not sulfates. I think it is the fact that the upper
atmosphere cooled above 30,000 feet when the models predicted
that would start at 50,000 feet. That is why the clouds
increased. That is why the warming is muted. That is why it is
primarily in the night, and that is why it is primarily in the
winter. The 1.3 degree upward that you get from the Mitchell
model happens to be the exact same number that you get if you
assume that the warming of the 20th century had something to do
with the greenhouse effect after all. If you went out to
doubling CO2 at equilibrium, you would get a warming of 1.35
degrees.

Three more things. There are three separate sets of data
that say the same thing. You can get this from the surface
temperature record, from the satellite temperature record, from
the weather balloon record, and you can get it from a critical
analysis of the surface temperature. They all give you the same
number. Nature is trying to tell us something here. Nature is
running the model for you, and nature says that it is not
sulfates, it is the greenhouse effect itself, not as large as was
once feared, which is a nice thing to know.